Reading List June 2020 (Patreon)

Alright, so I’m a few days late, but I finally managed to extricate myself from the depths of the itch.io bundle. So while I’m up here for air, enjoy this list of the best articles/videos I read/watched during June!

Second Opinion

Whenever I finish a review, I usually end up watching a few other reviews or other related content afterwards. Here’s some of the best stuff other people have had to say about the games I’ve been talking about lately!

Wildfire Review by Graham Smith: My coverage of Wildfire ended up...not much of a review, so here are two actual reviews of the game. RPS’s Graham Smith wasn’t too impressed by the game, and expressed a lot of issues with it that honestly I share. If not for the protest angle, my interview would honestly have probably looked a lot like this one.

Wildfire Review: A Brilliant Stealth Game Full of Surprises by Leo Faierman: Faierman, meanwhile, really enjoyed it, so here’s a nice counterpoint to go along with the previous review.

Liberated is a “Both Sides” Tale in a Period of Resistance by Chris Compendio: I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get the George Floyd protests out of their head while covering games media. Compendio checked out Liberated, a much more literal cop story that also just happened to come out at the same time, and you can guess how hollow a cop story rings in current events.

RagnarRox’s Games from Underground #3 | Alternative Horror: Another game wrapup like my quarterly wrapup, but RagnarRox goes far more in-depth. And this time, he focused in on indie horror games. Bonus: a few of these titles happened to be in that itch.io bundle, so you may very well already own them!

Bonus: Amazon’s Crucible Flopped So Hard It’s Being Un-Released by Nathan Grayson:  First Crucible cut two of its three modes, but then before I could release this reading list with an article talking about that, it went and was “un-released” entirely! Crucible’s not the first take two in the games industry (remember Final Fantasy XIV? Artifact?), but it’s certainly a bold move, Cotton. We’ll have to see if it pays off for them.

Black Lives Matter

A month later, we’re talking about it a lot less, but the George Floyd protests are still going and police brutality hasn’t magically stopped happening. And as I’ve already mentioned, it’s consumed every corner of the world, including our small corner in the video game industry. Here's some of the best writing that's come out of it.

Seven Games by Black Developers You Can Support Right Now: Exactly what it says on the tin.

The Video Game Industry Has No Clue How to Respond to Protests by Gita Jackson: On the flip side of the coin, Jackson covered what AAA developers were doing during the early days of the protests, namely not a whole lot. While nobody’s expecting game developers to solve police brutality or anything, Jackson makes a reasonable point that even for a corporate #brand response, AAA game studios have been a bit lackluster.

The Future of the Video Game Labor Movement by Sisi Jiang: In a similar vein, Jiang detailed their personal experiences tackling racism inside Game Workers Unite, the most high-profile union effort in the industry. In their words: “Again and again, I was told that game developers were not capable of being radical. Yet I saw colleagues out-organizing GWU. They were pushing racial justice further than anything that union organizers ever accomplished.”

Four Games That Resonate (And One I Hate) as I Celebrate Juneteenth by Ash Parrish: Parrish celebrated Juneteenth by talking about games she felt best celebrated the spirit of the holiday. Meaning they’re also great games to be thinking about in this current cultural moment.

John Boyega is Doing What Star Wars Wouldn’t by Robert Daniels: While not strictly games focused, Daniels at Polygon put out a solid piece discussing how Star Wars has fallen short in representing the black experience, and how John Boyega has used that platform to speak out anyway.

Video Games Have to Reckon with How They Depict the Police by Imran Khan: Finally, Khan also took a look at how police are depicted in video games, and how post-George Floyd, that representation is going to get a lot more complicated.

Everything Else Happening in the Industry

Because the world is on fire right now, that of course means that there are about ten other problems or controversies that all deserve highlighting, too. Most notably, there’s been another wave of victims in the industry coming forward about sexual harassment and abuse.

Jim Sterling’s A Truly Fucked Up Industry: Sterling’s no stranger to calling out the industry’s many, many problems, but this time he got a bit more personal and frank when discussing the current wave of abuse allegations.

Gaming Can’t Fix its Abuse Problem One Person at a Time by Megan Farokhmanesh:  We’ve been through this pattern a few times now, and Farokmanesh is understandably tired of watching it repeat as she lays out a call for full, systematic reform.

As Streamers Spread Dangerous Conspiracy Theories, Twitch Does Little to Stop Them by Nathan Grayson: Our second Grayson article in the list, this one is a massive deep dive into how Twitch handles misinformation and conspiracy theories. The website doesn’t do much, but seems to have a few points of natural immunity in its favor.

All About Game Length

If there’s one issue in the video game industry that I harp on most about, however, it’s that games are too damn long! And this past month, I came across a lot of other voices saying the same thing.

HeavyEyed’s Are Games Too Long? : HeavyEyed meditated on his experience playing God of War and Resident Evil 3 back to back, and what that’s made him think about game length in general.

Shawn Layden: “I Would Welcome a Return to the 12 or 15 Hour AAA Game” by Matthew Handrahan: Handrahan summarizes a particularly notable slice of a longer interview with Shawn Layden. Layden tackles the issue from a familiar business standpoint: that bigger and bigger AAA games are completely unsustainable.

TheJWittz’s Can You Play EVERY Good Videogame?: The answer is probably pretty obvious (no, of course not), but that doesn’t make this video exploring the exact scale of how ridiculously overwhelmed we are with good games any less entertaining.

The Fun Stuff That Isn’t on Fire (Everything Else)

Super Bunnyhop’s Global Warming, as Depicted by 30 Years of Strategy Games: Mostly through the lens of Civilization, SBH took a look at how games have treated the subject of global warming through the decades as it ebbed and flowed in the public consciousness.

Jacob Geller’s Life in the Shadow of Midgar: Jacob Geller explored the themes the literal underclass living in FF7R's Midgar slums and the shockingly identical (arguably even worse) real life parallels of people’s homes being paved and built over as they still live in them.

Reconstructing a Lost NES Game From 30-Year-Old Source Code Disks by Rich Whitehouse and Frank Cifaldi: The Video Game History Foundation released a blog post about how they got a 30 year old unreleased video game to work, starting with a handful of floppy disks.

Linkus7’s How We Solved the Worst Minigame in Zelda’s History: A wild dive into the highly complicated and specific mathematics behind “solving” just one small part of a Windwaker speedrun. The level of effort on display here is just bonkers.

 If Found and Relatable Queer Alienation by Jeremy Signor: If Found’s an easy quarterly wrapup contender, but in the meantime, Signor had a wonderful article exploring the game’s themes, backing that analysis up with personal life experience.

Waypoint Radio’s What it Really Means to Be a “Prestige” Game: We’ve been mired in TLOU2 discourse for what feels like months at this point. And over that time, a big part of that discussion has been about whether or not games should really be trying to be “playable prestige television shows,” so much so that you’ve probably heard ten different versions of this argument. But this Waypoint podcast from a few weeks back worded it particularly succinctly and thoughtfully.

LambHoot’s Tension vs. Stress in Game Design: LambHoot returned to an old favorite to take a look at one specific axis of game design, comparing tension, the mindgames involved around making decisions while having imperfect information, with stress, or how rigorously demanding a game’s execution is, and how either can be used both successfully or not. This is also a video rabbit hole leading to a couple of Chariot Rider’s videos that both LambHoot and I would recommend!

GLAM Vol.2 by Ibrahim Hamdi: Take five minutes to check out these artful redesigns of game covers with arabic logos!

Cracking the Cryptic's The Miracle Sudoku: With a whole bunch of rules added in, this is less a Sudoku and more an entirely separate puzzle that borrows a few common rules, but that doesn’t make it any less fascinating to watch. Most of all thanks to the solver being utterly gobstopped by the puzzle’s genius even as he’s solving it! 

Matthewmatosis’s Recommending The Wonderful 101: Who better to sell you on a beloved cult classic than one of its greatest evangelists? If you missed The Wonderful 101 the first time around, Matthewmatosis will convince you to give it a try this time.

As the Internet Changes, James Rolfe Remains a Classic Man by Kevin Cortez: Cortez conducted a retrospective interview on James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd himself!